By Melyssa Allen

On April 25, 2007, the evening before the College's annual Celebrating Student Achievement Day, the Meredith community heard from an alumna who has had a lifetime of scholarly achievement.

Meredith honored internationally known Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, '54, by inviting her to deliver the inaugural "Woman of Achievement" lecture.  

In a lecture titled "A Mountain, A Cloud, and Missing Women," Trible discussed mountaintops as places of revelation in the Bible, pointing out that these sites "are barren of women."

Trible asked the audience to imagine women from the Bible, such as Mary, Mary Magdalene or Moses' sister Miriam, standing on a mountaintop in parallel with male figures.

"Never on a mountaintop did a woman receive a divine message, they remained male preserves, but not tonight," Trible said. "If this mountain will not come to women, women will come to this mountain."

A professor of Biblical studies at the Wake Forest University Divinity School, Trible is considered a leader in the text-based exploration of women and gender in scripture. She is the author of the books "God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality," "Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narrative," and "Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah."

Trible described her scholarly work as "not a wild re-imagining" of the Bible, but a "controlled, imaginative use of the Bible...taking different parts of the Bible and having them talk to each other."

The lecture was part of Meredith's Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Presidential Lecture Series. The lecture series brings major speakers to campus to explore issues relating to the College's campus-wide theme.